Revolution’s Blacked-Out Future World Won’t Be a Dystopia

BEVERLY HILLS, California — It may be set in a future world deprived of electricity and beset by bands of marauding swordsmen, but upcoming television series Revolution won’t be a downbeat doomfest, according to executive producer Jon Favreau.

“We didn’t want this to be a dystopic view of the future,” the Iron Man director said Tuesday at a press preview here for the show, which also has Lost and Fringe creator J.J. Abrams on its production team.

Set 15 years after a worldwide power failure has produced a back-to-the-earth civilization, the saga includes older folks who hanker for the days when technology reigned supreme as well as younger ones who feel perfectly at home in a steam-powered environment. “Some people are struggling to hang on to shreds of the old society, whereas Charlie’s generation sees this world as the pastoral, simple place where they grew up,” Favreau said. “We wanted to show this world through their eyes so that Revolution wouldn’t feel like The Road or Mad Max.”

The Revolution cast includes Billy Burke (Twilight) as a swashbuckling rogue and late addition Elizabeth Mitchell (Lost), but young Canadian actress Tracy Spiridakos proves to be the breakthrough talent. She stars as arrow-shooting adventuress Charlie Matheson, who leads a band of survivors in a quest to reunite a family that has been torn apart by a group called The Militia. (Favreau did not mention The Hunger Games or its bow-toting teen heroine by name, but he did note the recent string of popular young adult novels that portray teenagers and twenty-somethings as heroes “on the front lines” in the fight against oppression.)

More Revolution acting firepower comes in the form of Giancarlo Esposito. Fresh from his turn as an ice-cold meth mastermind in Breaking Bad, he portrays horse-riding Militia leader Capt. Tom Neville, who comes across as pure evil in Revolution’s pilot episode. Esposito cautioned that his character might not turn out to be all that wicked.

“Without this guy, there would be total anarchy,” he said. “He’s trying to restore some kind of order. Neville may seem like he’s on the wrong side of the fence but wait and see.”

As director of the pilot episode, Favreau referenced Cambodia’s ancient civilization of Angkor Wat, now overgrown with jungle growth. He also cast sidelong glances at Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run.

When it debuts Sept. 17 on NBC with an initial order of 13 episodes, Revolution will embark on its own survivalist drama amid a TV landscape that has given complicated mythologies a tough time ever since Lost went off the air. Recent high-concept dramas — Terra Nova, Awake and Alcatraz — all failed to make it beyond a single season.

But Revolution creator Eric Kripke (Supernatural) said he believes audiences will respond to a saga rife with “kick-ass” action and heartfelt emotions. “It’s very important to me, Jon and J.J. that this show would be about rebirth, hope and adventure,” he said.

Viewers will likely hanker for details about what exactly went wrong when the entire globe went off the grid.

“We’re going to have flashbacks where we see what happened in those first days of the blackout,” Kripke said, “how people made their ways out of the cities, how they found food, how they found water. That’s effective in small doses but it’s very harrowing, very dark.”

Instead, Kripke said he prefers to expend most of his energies on an upbeat narrative.

“The real tonal touchstone for me was Lord of the Rings, with that level of sprawling, epic storytelling,” he said. “But instead of taking place in a fantastical kingdom, I wanted to set Revolution in a world of vine-covered fast food restaurants and truck stops. This is not about a society falling apart. This is a story about society coming together.”